Fast-emerging Solar Industry Provides Ideal Environment for Manufacturing Management Solutions

FactoryPRO™ MES and FIS Lubricate End-End Lean Manufacturing

Few industrial sectors have grown as quickly as solar. Driven by technical breakthroughs for the efficient production of electricity using semiconductor materials, since 2010 the industry has enjoyed a compound annual growth rate of about 58%, says the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Government continues to play an important role in the growth rate through tax incentives. Opinion leaders say that solar will grow to become a leading source of North American residential and commercial electrical energy in the decades ahead. Accelerating the trend are lower cost materials and much improved manufacturing efficiency in the mode of Industry 4.0.

In regions of Western nations with ideal sunlight profiles, zoning authorities are seriously considering legislation to make solar a standard for new residential and commercial construction. Affordability is swiftly evaporating as an economic hurdle.

FactoryPRO is a platform-independent manufacturing execution system that delivers a 360° real-time dynamic view of the entirely solar panel manufacturing process. An internal Factory Information System (FIS) sets a new standard in actionable data communications. Importantly, FactoryPRO enjoys connectivity and interoperation with ERP and manufacturing automation systems. Industry 4.0 today! Most importantly, perhaps, is the increase in productivity and corresponding decrease in costs, leading to the ideal business case to pursue solar.

Solar manufacturing's challenges include acquisition of raw materials plus a wide variety of specialized components in an ideal supply chain both outside and inside the plant. Manufacturing operations must assure quality control, production equipment maintenance and packaging integrity. Real-time discovery of weak spots, failing equipment and inventory problems can change a profitable experience into a loser. Even the weather plays a role. Components must arrive at the right moment and finished, tested goods must depart on schedule.

FactoryPRO is engineered to meet this demanding environment. As a manufacturing management system, the cloud-based software communicates, connects and integrates each level of manufacturing to facilitate error-free products on each production run. Here are FP's chief virtues:

• Improved visibility, flexibility and responsiveness. FP implements an all-digital data rich environment for processes, supplies and inventory, equipment maintenance, documentation, production specifications, instant work-in-progress views and regulatory requirements.
• Risk mitigation. Instant data enables actionable information retrieval for limiting the scope of quality control issues. Customers achieve the ability to quickly solve production problems, thus preventing shipment of questionable devices.
• Continuous product improvement. Immediate access to data yields fast responses. Often, lack of timely equipment maintenance will cause out-of-spec quality issues. FP's capital equipment module forestalls this.

• Statistical Process Control. SPC is data hungry. Properly implemented for high volume production settings, real time SPC -- using industry-standard Western Electric rules -- becomes a containment engine for compliant products. Customers applaud the products they receive.
• Factory automation / robotics driver. Again, real time digital data is needed by automated processes. By linking MES to robotics software, customers achieve optimum results.
• Perfect preventive maintenance and real time alerts. FP implements a data rich environment to enable maintenance scheduling per vendor requirements, and monitors equipment status, seeking out-of-range operational data. MTBF tracking is both assured and instantly useful to keep operations smooth and error-free. FP's real time alerts inside our factory domain dashboard and email engine provide 24/7/365 coverage.

For solar panel and related component manufacturers, FactoryPRO runs in the cloud on secure servers. A chief benefit not mentioned above is the IT bonus: companies that employ MES software need far less IT support for production processes. Learn more here